I wrote quite a few blogs on licensing Oracle on VMware. Mainly because there is a lot of misunderstanding/FUD and Oracle let customers pay for something they do not have to pay for. Best example is the statement of many Oracle sales people that a complete VMware cluster needs to be licensed for Oracle, even if Oracle VM’s will never run on all of the nodes. As a result customers create a seperate VMware HA cluster for Oracle VM’s.

Basically Oracle behaves like a corrupt policeofficer in a dodgy country stopping your Ferrari and telling he will fine you just because your car is able to drive 300km/h. No prove you actually drove faster than allowed.

One of the best videos in which an Oracle employee explains subclustering is this one. The video was deleted from the VMworld.TV site within 24 hours on request by Oracle. Guess why? Because Oracle tactics is to be so unclear as possible about licensing.

At March 19 there is a great webinar on Oracle licensing for VMware.

VMware, in partnership with DBTA, has invited the world’s most recognizable experts in this subject to join us on a webinar for a frank and direct conversation about how to properly adhere to existing contracts, as they exist presently and are available publicly, to correctly license virtualized infrastructure for Oracle.

Please join us as Don Sullivan moderates a discussion on this subject with globally renowned subject matter experts Dave Welch of “House Of Brick” and Daniel Hesselink of “License Consulting”

Early February 2015 VMware announced Site Recovery Manager 6.0. This release has only one new feature besides being supported on vSphere 6.0

The VMware Storage DRS and SRM teams have been working together to prevent situations where a VM could be moved by Storage DRS to a datastore which is not protected by SRM array based replication or to a datastore with different replication characteristics than the source datastore (async or sync replication).

Since SRM 5.5 it was possible to Storage vMotion VM’s to a different datastore as long as the datastore was part of the same consistency group. Consistency groups (also called storage groups) is a feature available on storage arrays which allows to group multiple LUNs. All the LUNs in a given consistency group are replicated as a unit sharing the same specifications.

In previous versions of SRM a datastore cluster must contain one and only one consistency group.

Storage DRS in vSphere 6 is aware of which datastores are replicated and which are part of a consistency group. This means replicated and non-replicated datastores can be part of the same Storage DRS datastore cluster. A datastore cluster can now also have multiple consistency groups.

These enhancements make life for the administrator a lot more easy.

Some caveats:

Mind SRM using vSphere Replication cannot be used for Fault Tolerance enabled VMs. SRM using array replication can protect those Fault Tolerance enabled VMs , but VM will not be FT enabled after recovery. Admnistrators must manually re-enable. Source Matthew Meyer @mattdmeyer

VMware vSphere Replication in vSphere 6 GA still has a 15 min RPO and not 5 minutes like in the beta!

More info on Storage DRS enhancements in this blogpost of Cormac Hogan

VCDXs who want to earn multiple VCDX certifications only need to submit a new design that meets the certification requirement. No additional defense is required.For a multiple VCDX-NV certification, another defense is still requred.

Two (instead of one ) VMware Certified Associate (VCA) certificati0ns for cloud solution track: VCA6-CMA and VCA6-HC . No information available yet on these two new certifications.